PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Tobacco Factory, Bristol (Tue 20-Wed 21 Sept)

When we ran an interview with Les Dennis in Venue-on-paper this month, we put WTF? next to his name on the cover. Well, it turns out we were a little premature in suggesting that there might be something a bit WTF-ish about his turning up round these parts to appear in this one-man play at the Tobacco Factory. Turns out too, you see, that he gives a fine, engaging and well-observed performance as the eponymous Jigsy, a seen-better-days, old-school comedian whose career isn’t so much going to pieces as simply stalled in the working men’s clubs of his native Liverpool.

Not that Dennis had to do a great deal of background research here: a scouser himself, his own career began on the very same booze-and-bingo circuit and he must have come across more than a few real-life Jigsies in his time. Fair dos, though – writer Tony Staveacre’s portly, red-faced protagonist is no clichéd bitter old fart, railing against political correctness gone mad, the ‘alternative’ comedy scene and whatever else it was that supposedly killed traditional working-class entertainment, and Dennis endows him with a disingenuous honesty and bluff humanity, skilfully leaking droplets of information about his fairly disastrous off-stage existence into a 70-minute rumination on Jigsy’s philosophy of ‘laughs and life’.

At times, perhaps, there’s just a tad too much of this backstage philosophising (the whole piece is set in Jigsy’s dressing room) and attendant vignettes about the lives of other – real – comedians, like Tommy Cooper, Peter Cook and, of course, Ken Dodd – but the anecdotes are strong enough to carry it, and Dennis delivers them with the mercurial skill of an impersonator and the slightly knowing emotiveness of a bar-room tragedian. At the end, he gets a standing ovation. Our survey said? Good stuff. (Eric Blair)

Copyright Eric Blair 2011